Carter: Longtime leader of Newark drug treatment center steps down

Aristide Economopoulos/The Star-LedgerDave Kerr is not your typical president of a company, but a drug rehab program is not your typical business either. Kerr's has an open door policy, never turning anyone away, including staff and addicts.

Dave Kerr was demoralized walking through the door of his brownstone looking home in Newark’s Lincoln Park. The drug addicts living with him and his cousin, Richard Grossklaus, cleaned them out. So much for trying to help dope fiend parolees get their lives together.

Kerr says he got angry and he was ready to kick them out until an envelope on the floor caught his eye.

There was a $1,000 check inside and a letter from a foundation encouraging him to continue his good work. What could they be talking about? He didn’t have a drug program. All he had was a desire to help these hardcore, manipulative addicts who were ripping him off.

The letter, for some reason, changed his mind.

"Maybe this is a sign,’’ Kerr recalls now. "I said 'let me stick this out.' ’’

(Later Kerr recalled filling out an application for a grant that he forgot about as soon as he mailed it.)

All this was in the late 1960s and Kerr had no idea he was about to spend the next 43 years fighting for addicts, believing they can change.

They are young and old, ethnically diverse. They are your family members, co-workers, the man on the bus, the woman at the hair salon. Some struggle more than others, but Kerr says he has loved every one of them as he steps away now from the drug treatment organization he and Grossklaus built in the days after opening that letter.

Kerr retired last month as president and chief executive officer of Integrity House, a Newark drug treatment program serving 1,400 people every year. He eased his way out the door packing up plaques, pictures and memories of a career he didn’t plan.

Aristide Economopoulos/The Star-Ledger Dave Kerr is not your typical president of a company, but a drug rehab program is not your typical business either. Kerr's has an open door policy, never turning anyone away, including staff and addicts.

"I didn’t know anything,’’ Kerr, 69, said. "I didn’t know what I was doing then and I still don’t know what I’m doing now sometimes.’’

That’s Kerr, humble and unassuming, poking a comical finger at himself over bagels and coffee in his Glen Ridge home.

"He was the person, who, if it didn’t seem logical and sensible, he was the person who could take it on,’’ Grossklaus said.

Kerr understood early on — when it wasn’t the prevailing wisdom — that addiction needs to be treated with long term care. Though he did not plan it that way, he became a pioneer of treatment through therapeutic communities, a model that relies on groups in which former addicts help clients reclaim their lives. These communities, the basis of many programs today, sprouted up across the country in the 1970s when Kerr said traditional health professionals gave up on addicts, doubting that they could be helped. Once an addict always an addict.

"David didn’t believe those things,’’ said Robert Denes, chief executive officer of Discovery Institute for Addictive Disorders in Marlboro.

"He thought there was a tremendous amount of unharnessed good in people, that even the addict can do wonderful things.’’

For Kerr, this work is not about handouts. He demands that members of the Integrity family get clean, hold down a job, take care of their families.

"I’m not going to lift a finger until I see something from you,’’ Kerr tells people who come to him seeking help. "What are you going to do for yourself.’’

He says he learned to be this way from addicts, who wanted him to be tougher on them when he first moved to Newark after the riots. Kerr was the nerdy, "Mister Nice Guy" from Verona who they stole from to get high. But he got hip to them real quick and sharpened his street smarts.

Kerr learned to love many, but trust few as Integrity began to stretch its legs in 1968. The program spread from one building around Lincoln Park to several more Victorian style homes and sites in Newark, including a campus in Secaucus. Tens of thousands of lives were saved along the way and most, if not all, tell a similar story about the man who wouldn’t give up on them.

"Everybody looks at us like we’re the bottom on the totem pole,’’ said Frank Lillis, 24, of Old Bridge. "He (Kerr) is just a regular guy.’’

It hasn’t hit him yet that he’s gone from Integrity, that so much time has flown by in the blink of an eye. He and the board of trustees began his departure three years ago knowing the organization has experienced workers from the secretary on up to Kerr’s replacement, Robert Budsock.

"This agency won’t even feel a blip,’’ Kerr said. "That’s what makes it much easier. I feel good leaving understanding that.’’